Search This Blog

Books; People; Ideas : These are few of my favourite things. As I live between day-to-day compromises and change-the-world aspirations, this is the chronicle of my journey, full of moments of occasional despair and opportune discoveries, of connections and creations, and, most of all, my quest of knowledge as conversations.

Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Indian Higher Education: A Map to El Dorado

India is the world's most exciting Higher Education market. One may receive this with a tinge of skepticism, simply because one has heard this before. But it would be wrong to think that India was always the world's most exciting Higher Education market. That would have been China in the past, and America before that: India's moment is coming now.

Part of it is simple demography: National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030 (see here) highlights some of the fundamentals. In terms of what it calls the Demographic Window of Opportunity - the years when the proportion of Children (0 - 15 years) is less than 30% and the proportion of the seniors (65 years and above) is less than 15% - India arrives now: Its DWO stretches from 2015 to 2050 (see page 24). This closes in Russia and the United States in 2015, and China, which remains a relatively youthful country, has only 10 years left (till 2025). The other exciting demographic opportunities may be much smaller (notably, Brazil or Iran, from the same chart) or disrupted for other reasons (Sub-Saharan Africa, which has a relatively youthful population, but will face a food production challenge to maintain the same, apart from political turmoil).

However, India's demographic opportunity was always rather well known. Other challenges, regulation and complexity, were always daunting. This is where the elections of 2014 may be put in context. Whether or not the current Prime Minister is acceptable to everyone, the electoral mandate is mostly towards an unified, national idea of India. The country is united in aspiration, and is driven by a strong middle class participation (66% of the eligible voters voted). The electoral platform they voted for is one of reducing regulation and government interference, and this may actually happen. The administration has a clear mandate - the first administration to have that since 1984 - and can impose its will. Whether such powers will be used for productive purposes, or will be frittered away instead in pushing an obsessive social agenda of creating a majoritarian state, remains to be seen. But, if the new administration stick to the message of the mandate rather than succumbing to the hubris (and, as pragmatic politicians, they may as well make the most of this once in a lifetime opportunity rather than indulging in megalomania), the new administration will do just as it was told - step aside and reduce complexity.

Higher Education will be a key battleground. It is currently inefficient, ill-equipped, understaffed and lack technology and innovation. Not just it matters that the neighbour and competitor China is making huge strides in Higher Education, the Indian government's immediate challenge - the downside of demographic opportunity - is to be able to absorb an additional 10 million people who will arrive in the workforce every year. Since all this will happen within the context of a changing workplace, economic and technological shifts, this is a hugely complex issue, and will require the state to go beyond the simple prescriptions of either more state investment or complete abdication to private interests. As the new government starts building roads, ports, airports and energy infrastructure, it would need to give equal importance to building India's education infrastructure all over again. This will mean both an opportunity to build new, private education provisions, as well as opportunities for innovation, of public-private partnerships, of innovation, of introduction of technology, for enterprise in education.

The conversation in the West about India's Higher Education opportunity often centers around a piece of legislation called the Foreign Education Providers' Bill. This legislation has been languishing in the Indian parliament for more than a decade, and despite the Cabinet approving it and the bill going through several modifications, it has failed to pass. Despite all the euphoria about the business-friendliness of the incoming government, this is one piece of legislation they are unlikely to do anything about. This is not just because that the current mood in India is social conservatism, but also because of implicit anti-globalising electoral mandate. The policy climate in India is likely to be dominated by preference for Indian businesses and institutions taking the lead, rather than a preference for open to all liberalisation which the previous regime preferred (but failed to deliver).

This patterns actually create advantage for private sector investors in education over the publicly funded institutions in the West. So, the canvass for the British universities will remain mostly unchanged, but exciting opportunities may open up for Laureates of the world, who are looking to put money and expertise in Indian institutions for a decent return. They will surely cash in as India will become friendlier to foreign investors, but will keep the education sector firmly in Indian hands. So, the much rumoured campuses of foreign universities are unlikely to happen in India anytime soon, but we can expect an uptick of foreign investment going into Indian education.

If I said India is education's El Dorado - a place where everyone wants to go but no one knows how - I was correct. But a map to El Dorado may just be emerging for education investors, which seems full of allure and promise.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A friend has recently forwarded me a quote from Lord Macaulay's speech in the British Parliament on 2nd February 1835. I reproduce the quote below: "I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation."
The email requested me to forward me to every indian I know. I was tempted, but there were two oddities about this quote. First, the language, which appeared …

Business gift giving has always been common and contentious at the same time. Business gifts are usually seen as an ‘advertising, sales promotion and marketing communication medium’ (Cooper etal, 1991). Arunthanesetal (1994) points out that such gifting is practised usually for three reasons: (a) in appreciation for past client relationships, placing a new order, referrals to other clients, etc.; (b) in the hopes of creating a positive, first impression which might help to establish an initial business relationship; and (c) giving may be perceived as a quid Pro quo (i.e. returning a favour or expecting a favour in return for something).

The practitioners of gift-giving generally argue that doing business is often an aggregation of personal interactions and relationships, and gift-giving should be seen as a natural way of maintaining and enhancing these relationships. ‘Business gifts, especially one given in the course of the festive season, is …

In an earlier post, I pointed out that the application of 'platform thinking' in education misses the mark, as it fails to understand how value is created in education. Since this apparently contradicts my earlier enthusiasm for the university as a 'user network', this statement needs further explanation.
To start with, Clayton Christiansen's idea that the universities of the Twentieth Century needs to evolve from its current 'value chain' model - wherein its value lies in its processes - to a form of User Network, where its value emanates from its community, still resonates with me. The Value Chain model, with departments, examinations, textbooks and degrees, that we know the university for, is very much a late Nineteenth/ early Twentieth century formulation. And, indeed, one can claim that the universities were always communities, and its value came from being a member of that community rather than its end product - the degrees - for much of history. It …

In most societies today, making profits are accepted as moral, if not especially praiseworthy. This was not as obvious as it appears today – people used to be embarrassed about making a profit not so long ago.

Crazy as it seems today, it is worth thinking why it was so.

Profits, as economists will put it, is the reward for risk-taking, for putting a business enterprise together in the pursuit of an objective. In this definition, remember, profits are not what it is commonly understood to be – the gross middle-line towards the bottom – but a figure net of entrepreneur’s earning [wages for his labour], dividends and interests on borrowed capital, and provisions for building and other physical assets [a sort of rent, offsetting what these assets could have earned if leased out]. This pure profit – surplus – accrues to a business as a reward to its organisation, for the act of entrepreneurship itself.

Economists were divided on how this surplus comes about. The conventional wisdom was, as I …

I wrote a note on Kolkata, the city I come from and would always belong to, in July 2010. Since then, the post attracted many visitors and comments, mostly critical, as most people, including those from Kolkata, couldn't see any future for the city. My current effort, some 18 months down the line, is also prompted by a recent article in The Economist, The City That Got Left Behind, which echo the pessimism somewhat.
I, at least emotionally, disagree to all the pessimism: After all Kolkata is home and I live in the hope of an eventual return. Indeed, some change has happened since I wrote my earlier post: The geriatric Leftist government that ruled the state for more than 30 years was summarily dispatched, and was replaced by a lumpen-capitalist populist government. Kolkata looked without a future with the clueless leftists at the helm; it now looks without hope.
However, apart from bad governance, there is no reason why Kolkata had to be poor and hopeless. It sits right inside …

Buzzwords have disadvantages. Right now, experiential learning is one, and that means we put the label on everything and it stops to mean anything. Also, this means reasonable conversation about experiential learning becomes difficult - at times such as this, either you preach experiential learning or you are traditional, antiquarian and hopelessly out of touch.
But, overlooking the limitations of experiential learning can cause big problems. Experiential Learning does many things - putting practice at the heart of learning is an important paradigm shift - but not everything, and it is important to be aware what it does not do.
Usually, we equate the terms Project-based Learning (the method) with Experiential Learning (the idea) and Learning from Experience (the ideal), treating them as one and the same and using the terms interchangeably. Any talk about distinctive meaning of these terms is usually seen as pedantic, but really represent very different ideas about education.
Learnin…

India's unemployment rate has reached a historical high and the government is panicking. It has rejected and suppressed the report and committed itself to inventing a new set of numbers. Members of the national statistical body have resigned, and the bad job numbers have become one of the worst kept secrets in its modern history.
As the government went down the road of obfuscation, it had also fooled itself believing that everything was fine. Once the statistical reports were questioned, the best explanation that the Head of the apex economic policy-making body could come up with was that Uber and other taxi-hailing companies have created millions of jobs in India. But then, the crisis is anything but hidden - walk on any street in any neighbourhood in any Indian city, and it is likely that you will see a few working-age people loitering, waiting or playing cards or carom in the middle of the day. IMF has recently warned that youth inactivity in India is highest among all develo…

Smart presentations don't mean valuable insights. So it is with the current fad of presenting the vision of an all-new 21st-century education - through presentations, conferences and infographics - style trumps substance all the way through.

For, despite the claims of revolutionary changes in society and the workplace, the neat charts that lay down 21st-century skills next to the 20th-century one's show do not how different they would be, but rather how similar these are projected to be.

We are told that we have arrived at a fundamentally disruptive moment in history and we need new skills. So, we need, for example, communication and critical thinking, learning to learn and a host of other cool things. Indeed, many of those terms are very familiar to the educator: Many of those were around for more than two centuries, ever since the dreams of liberal education were spelt out.

When these slides were presented, I often wondered whether the point about critical thinking meant …

I didn't write for almost three weeks as I was in India. The essence of my work there is to deal with employment creation. Part of my work is pro-bono - a city initiative focused on Industry 4.0 - and the other part is commercial, advising a large Indian corporation on the development of next-generation Skills training programmes. But the sense of crisis regarding unemployment cuts across scale and scope of my work and is a recurrent theme that pops up everywhere.
India has a really big challenge. About 2 million people reach working age every month in India, and even if only half of them are actively seeking employment, the few thousand jobs that the organised sector creates are woefully inadequate. India may be the fastest growing large economy in the world, but demonetisation of 2016 and poorly implemented General Sales Tax (GST) have hit businesses hard and froze up recruitment in many sectors. The widely promoted 'Make in India' initiative - the government's atte…

That governments are so enthusiastically trying to promote start-up cultures, handing out investment grants and building fancy new hubs, would make Milton Friedman turn in his grave: One can anticipate his protest - it is not the business of government to do business!
But then, democracy in its 'for the middle class, by the middle class' incarnation expects the government to be a job creation machine, and when all else fails, the Ministers say 'let start-ups be'! In fact, they celebrate it: In this affair, failure, the hallmark of government programmes, is some sort of credit. It allows the governments to celebrate the doctrine of creative destruction - ever so cool - while destructively creating a self-blaming proletariat, whose revolutions are limited to ventures and whose idea of nirvana is an Exit. There was never a better mantra invented to justify a permanent bureaucracy.
But, at this point, I must stop and make an important distinction. My post is about start-…